While traditional medical treatment has focused on nonspecific
suppression of the inflammatory process, advances
in our knowledge of the immunopathogenesis of IBD have
opened up a new array of potential biologically targeted
treatments, allowing the management of IBD to enter a new
era at the beginning of the 1990s with the development of
new biological therapies selectively blocking the inflammatory
cascade. Although mouse models of IBD have been
useful to identify appropriate candidates, it is only through
further trials in human disease that these targets can be
validated.
(EN)